Secret Six #31

Scandal Savage has a secret “Get Out of Hell Free” card, and she’s finally decided she wants to use it to free her lover Knockout from, well, Hell. But the dang thing’s been stolen from her safe — and the only one of the Secret Six with that kind of safecracking ability is Ragdoll. When Scandal barges into his room demanding the card back, he fights back — until Scandal stabs him in the stomach. Realizing he’s dying, he grabs the card and whisks himself to Hell. The team decides to follow him and drag him back — Black Alice says she’ll never return there, but she shows them one of the secret entrances — inside the world’s worst shopping mall. But there’s nothing good that can happen when you willingly walk into Hell. All that, plus a serial killer has some dire plans in store for Liana, Scandal’s current girlfriend…

Verdict: Thumbs up. As always, deeply twisted, funny, grim, brilliant storytelling here. And amazing stuff going on here — particularly the serial killer, who likes to punish himself by putting hot sauce in his eyes. And the hellishly dull shopping mall. The whole thing is just wonderful, and I’ll be really surprised if the rest of the storyarc isn’t just as outstanding.

Green Lantern #63

The seven representatives of the ring corpsmen go off in search of the energy entities that Krona has kidnapped. They find Krona’s hideout, access the ominous Book of the Black to learn that he was at least partially responsible for the use of green energy as a weapon and that he was directly responsible for the programming error that caused the Manhunters to go rogue ages ago. And the Guardians have decided to act directly against Hal Jordan by ordering an ambush.

Verdict: Thumbs down. It’s all frustratingly dull and slow-moving. It’s all being stretched out to fit future trade paperbacks, and that means it’s turning into a poorly created story.

Today’s Cool Links:

• Not a link — just a short Expo note. The next planning meeting for the upcoming Comic Book Expo is happening this Friday at 7 p.m. at Awesome Books, 3009 34th St. The Expo is happening in less than a month, so if you want to help out, don’t miss this meeting!
• Project Rooftop is starting their tribute to Dwayne McDuffie with some redesigns of Static.
• Bully digs up some superhero blueprints.
• Beautiful photos from Antarctica.
• When you really want a super plumbing job…

Joe the Barbarian #8

It’s been much, much too long since we saw the last issue of this, so let’s review. Joe is a normal kid in the modern world. His dad’s dead, his mom is distant, the bank is about to foreclose on their house. Joe is bullied by other kids, and he’s diabetic. It’s been too long since he had anything to eat, and he’s now hallucinating that he’s in a fantasy world based on his own house, where all the citizens are based on his toys, the land is under attack by the forces of King Death, and Joe is acclaimed as a mythical hero called, ominously, the Dying Boy. But is he really hallucinating? Or is this all happening on another level? Will Joe be able to make it downstairs to the kitchen to get a soda, or will he and the fantasy world he imagines die a dark, cold death?

Well, last issue, Joe was on the verge of getting his much-needed dose of sugar when he lost his soda and fell into the basement. Now Joe is injured, trapped in the realm of King Death himself. His pet rat-turned-knightly-protector Jack is on hand to help, but even his fighting spirit falters when King Death raises his long-dead brothers to fight against them. Smoot and Zyxy show up to help, and King Death’s forces suffer a revolt from within. But only Joe can save the day. Will he be able to bring light and life back to the twilight fantasy world? Will he get a soda? Can he find a way to ensure the future of both the fantasy world and his real life?

Verdict: Thumbs up. This one ends on a pretty epic note. Great writing by Grant Morrison and even more beautiful artwork by Sean Murphy. If you haven’t read this one before now, you may as well wait for the trade paperback, but you definitely will want to read the whole thing.

Sir Edward Grey, Witchfinder: Lost and Gone Forever #2

Sir Edward gets to know his guide, the frontier scout Kaler, and his friend, a crazy Paiute named Isaac. Kaler warns him that he shouldn’t bother going back to the town, or they’ll kill him. But Sir Edward is still intent on tracking down Lord Glaren, so Kaler agrees to try to help. They meet up with Eris, a pretty blonde woman who preaches a weird combination of Christianity and witchcraft to the Indians. After Kaler reveals that he and Isaac have been reading fictionalized accounts of Sir Edward’s adventures in dime novels, Grey recounts his own origin story — as a boy, he tracked down, was injured by, and killed a werewolf, and was saved from the curse of lycanthropy by a combination of faith and science. With all that out of the way, and with a mysterious gunman on their trail, will Grey and Kaler be able to track down Lord Glaren?

Verdict: Thumbs up. Lots and lots of stuff packed into this one, and I really wished for even more. It’s a great story so far, mysterious and spooky and action-packed. Definitely looking forward to the rest of this series.

Alright, short and simple tonight. Y’all know the rules, right? Friday Night Fights is all about the fightin’.

Tonight’s battle comes from July 2009’s Chew #2 by John Layman and Rob Guillory, as the very calm, very sophisticated Mason Savoy faces off against a bunch of mafia ninjas.

So there we go. See youse mugs next week!

Axe Cop: Bad Guy Earth #1

For those of you who aren’t already familiar with Axe Cop, let me sum things up for you. It’s a comic created by two brothers. The artist, Ethan Nicolle, is 30 years old. The writer, Malachai Nicolle, is six.

I’ll repeat that for you: The writer is six years old.

This means that the series is impossibly awesome.

It’s been a webcomic for about a year, but Dark Horse is now giving it a limited three-issue series.

Our heroes here are Axe Cop (a cop who fights crime with an axe) and Dinosaur Soldier (Axe Cop’s partner, who is a dinosaur soldier). They must contend with normal cops and the army, who are offended that a police officer would use an axe instead of a gun, an evil planet that wants to destroy Earth, and psychic villains who want to turn everyone on the planet into criminals. Can our heroes prevail, armed only with axes, faint bombs, a flying police car, a planet shocker, a laser-portal gun that can travel through time, a good guy machine, and a fire-breathing dinosaur with giant chainguns for arms?

Verdict: Thumbs up. Seriously, didn’t you hear me say “fire-breathing dinosaur with giant chainguns for arms”?

Love and Capes: Ever After #2

Married bliss continues for Abby and Mark (better known to the world as the superhero Crusader). They purchase a building in the city, start remodeling plans for their apartment, and prepare for a visit from their parents. Complications ensue, of course, including Mark getting temporarily de-aged to 10 years old. And they decide to reveal Mark’s secret identity to Abby’s parents, creating some all new complications.

Verdict: Thumbs up. A fun story — actually, several fun stories — with excellent art, dialogue, and humor. It actually feels like there are too many mini-plotlines in here, but I still enjoyed the full comic just fine.

Avengers Academy #10

Well, let’s see — Veil is desperately trying to avoid being kicked out of the Academy, but it seems like she can’t stop putting her foot in it. Giant-Man comes up with an idea to help Hazmat live a normal day — he teams her up with mutant power-drainer Leech, whose ability to shut off her powers means she can spend a day outside of her containment suit. And Speedball takes the class on a field trip to Stamford, Connecticut, where he was involved in an accident that killed several hundred people a few years ago.

Verdict: Thumbs up. A nice change-of-pace story. Speedball takes the lead, Hazmat gets her chance to act mature, and Veil shows her dangerously impulsive side. Fantastic art by Sean Chen.

Today’s Cool Links:

• Chris Sims got to make an appearance on “The Daily Show” to talk about Batman. You can watch the video here, as well as be horrified by comments by awful racist douchehats.
• Here’s a fun article about the influence of awesome illustrator Edward Gorey.
• And finally… Vampire Hockey Players!

American Vampire #12

We finally get another issue focusing on Skinner Sweet. He’s gone to visit a Wild West Show in Idaho in 1919 that includes some actors recreating the popular retelling of the gunfight that supposedly killed him. Sweet’s not impressed with the historical inaccuracy, nor with the has-beens and losers who make up the show’s stars — one of whom is a former madam of a famous brothel, and one of Skinner’s lovers. But he’s willing to let the inaccuracies stand, until he learns that his former lover actually betrayed him to the authorities. He kills some of the actors and lets the rest kill each other, but his confrontation with his former lover doesn’t turn out the way he expected.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Loved the story — the Wild West Shows always struck me as particularly bizarre sideshows, and they’re certainly a perfect place for a monster like Skinner Sweet to go on a rampage. Wasn’t real fond of the artwork in this one — it’s not by the regular artist, and he had some trouble drawing the “American Vampire” style of bloodsucker. Pretty pale palette of colors, too…

Detective Comics #874

Batman and Red Robin are investigating some animal smugglers, but Dick is still suffering occasional hallucinations from the poison he got dosed with last issue. Meanwhile, the bulk of this issue focuses on Commissioner Jim Gordon, who has a rare meeting with his estranged son, Jim Jr., a character I wasn’t previously familiar with. Junior is a clinical psychopath, his sister believes he’s a murderer, and his dad doesn’t know what to believe. The question is whether Junior’s mental illness is controlled by medication… or whether it isn’t.

Verdict: Thumbs up. I enjoyed the lengthy dialogue between Commissioner Gordon and his son a lot more than I was expecting to. Jim Jr. doesn’t come off as a mentally healthy person, but there’s also enough doubt there to make you wonder whether or not he’s a bad guy.

Atomic Robo and the Deadly Art of Science #4

That scoundrel Thomas Edison is making his schemes while Robo and Mr. Tesla try to figure out the connection between all the robberies. When Robo later meets up with Jack Tarot and his daughter (and Robo’s girlfriend) Helen, he tangles with another of Edison’s giant robots and then realizes what small detail all the robberies included. All that, plus Helen discovers that Robo is, um, underage…

Verdict: Thumbs up. Loved this one so much. The dialogue between Robo and Helen was excellent and hilarious.

Today’s Cool Links:

• A nice video of Dwayne McDuffie talking about the perils of Writing Comics While Black.
• Congrats to Shane and Chris Houghton, whose “Reed Gunther” series is going to be published by Image Comics.
• What were H.P. Lovecraft’s favorite words?

Monday stinks!

It stinks!

Stinks!

STINKS!

STINKS!

(Brought to you by the Foundation for Reminding Everyone that Monday Stinks and by the Committee for Remembering that Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday Also Stink, But Not as Bad as Monday)

Dwayne McDuffie died this week. And I’m still not over it. He wasn’t my favorite writer, but he was up in the top ranks. He’d worked on comics I liked, and he’d founded an incredibly cool comic company. His work turned me into a comics reader again, after years away from the hobby. He had his head on straight, and I respected him enormously. So naturally, I decided to see if I could find something he wrote for Friday Night Fights.

I was all set to scan a really cool fight from one of the first few issues of Icon — Rocket awesomely knocking around lots of thuggish, bullying cops. But I found something I liked better. It’s not as over-the-top violent, but it’s one of the most powerful things I’ve ever gotten to read in a comic.

So this is from November 1993’s Icon #7 by Dwayne McDuffie, M.D. Bright, and Mike Gustovich. The backstory: Icon is an extremely long-lived alien who was stranded on Earth in the 1830s. His escape pod was found by a slave, and the pod automatically rewrote his DNA to match whoever opened the pod, to improve his chances of survival. So after 150 years as a black man, Augustus Freeman has become a very wealthy businessman with a very conservative outlook. Raquel Ervin is a teenager from the bad side of Paris Island who has discovered that Freeman has superpowers — she persuades him to become a superhero, and he gives her an alien-tech belt that allows her to become his sidekick, Rocket.

Anyway, Raquel discovers that she’s pregnant and goes to Freeman asking for a loan so she can get an abortion. She’s angry about it and gives him a lot of guff, expecting that he’ll disapprove of her decision. But he reveals that a few decades ago, when he was married, his human wife got pregnant. It seemed likely that a baby with human and alien DNA wouldn’t be viable and would certainly endanger the mother’s life, so they made the then-risky and illegal decision to abort the baby. At that point, Icon says:

And Raquel responds in a way that surprises the reader, Icon, and probably Raquel herself:

And there we go. Two different characters with radically different backgrounds and personalities, neither one conforming to easy stereotypes. That’s what I loved about McDuffie’s writing — his characters would be interesting with or without powers and colorful spandex. And what he wrote always had power.

I hope there are more writers out there emulating what he was able to do. Comics need good writers and good characters.

Morning Glories #7

Our focus in this issue is on Zoe’s history, from her childhood in Mumbai, orphaned but gifted with bizarre intelligence and insight, to her present, angry at the world, craving the popularity she used to enjoy, and stuck in the deeply psychotic Morning Glories Academy. We also get some flashbacks to a year ago, when she was living a seemingly normal life. And things start getting nasty when the Morning Glories cheerleading squad gives her a really simple tryout — she just has to answer a few simple questions about the worst moments of her life.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Nicely done — after last issue’s future shocker, it’s nice to reconnect with the students. And it’s especially nice to see some character background and mysteries for the previously shallow Zoe.

Dethklok #3

Dethklok’s next tour is going to be something amazing — they’ve had an immense train built — the Dethtrain — and they’re going to perform their next concert on top of it. Of course, there are some problems ahead. Pickles, quite sensibly, doesn’t trust the scheme at all and thinks they’re all going to die on the train. Elderly bluesman Mashed Potato Johnson appears with a warning about an evil spirit that’ll be stalking the train and a request that the band help save him from the Blues Devil. Can anyone stop both the Train Ghoul and the Blues Devil? And just what perils are waiting at the end of the Dethtrain’s line?

Verdict: Thumbs up. Nasty, brutish, and funny — everything I expect from the most brutal death metal band of all time.

Dungeons & Dragons #4

Our party of adventurers is in trouble again. They’ve been ambushed by grave robbers in an ancient dwarven ruin and triggered a trap that may drown them all in a few minutes. Bree the halfling thief figures out to escape from the trap, but then the party gets split while navigating a ventilation tunnel. While Khal the dwarven paladin and Tisha the spell-slinging tiefling share their abbreviated life stories, Aldric Fell, Bree, and Varis the city-loving elf run into a floating green skull that’s less troublesome than they expected. And what’s at the bottom of this dungeon?  An invasion force from another world.

Verdict: Thumbs up. The action is fine, of course, but I got jazzed about some of the smaller elements — Bree’s equational thinking when it comes to traps, Khal’s dwarven poetry, Tisha’s backstory, the magical skull, and the idea that a well-constructed dungeon will always have ventilation shafts to keep the air breathable. This is definitely not just a mindless dungeon crawl.

Doom Patrol #19

The second part of a crossover with the Secret Six — the two teams are battling it out while Oolong Island’s previously dormant volcano finally erupts, threatening all the mad scientists on the island. In an emergency like this, everyone pitches in to help and — oh wait, my mistake, everyone keeps right on fighting. Ragdoll gets attacked by a pelican, Jeannette gets dropped into Danny the Street (now sadly downgraded into Danny the Bungalow), and Elasti-Woman shows off just how tall she can grow. The Six get escorted off the island, but will it be enough to keep the Doom Patrol’s Oolong hosts from kicking them out, too?

Verdict: Thumbs up. It all seems perfectly acceptable, and I’d consider adding this one to my regular pull list — but we’ve just learned that “Doom Patrol” is about to get canceled. Sigh. I guess all comics get canceled eventually, but still, what a bummer.

Today’s Cool Links:

• As a tribute to the late Dwayne McDuffie, Project Rooftop is holding a special tribute, challenging artists to redesign McDuffie’s character Static.
• What Mike Sterling said: This would really be a fun version of the Justice League. Oh, what could have been…
• Here’s a really nice history of old Armed Services editions of books for soldiers overseas during WWII.

Well, here’s some deeply depressing news.

Comic writer Dwayne McDuffie has died much, much too young of unspecified causes.

McDuffie’s work is what got me reading comics again while I was in grad school. I had a friend in the dorms who was reading Milestone Media’s comics — which McDuffie helped found back in the early ’90s — and I got hooked hard on the “Blood Syndicate” series.

He wrote all the first few issues of all of Milestone’s initial releases, including “Blood Syndicate,” “Static,” “Icon,” and “Hardware.” He also wrote comics ranging from “Fantastic Four” and “Justice League of America” to “Deathlok,” “Damage Control,” “X-O Manowar,” “Legends of the Dark Knight,” and “Beyond!”

In addition to comics, he was also a writer and producer for animated cartoons. He developed his Milestone character Static into a TV star in “Static Shock.” He also wrote tons of great stuff on “Justice League” and “Justice League Unlimited.” He worked on the “Ben 10” cartoons and wrote the script for the animated adaptation of “All Star Superman.”

Obviously, you don’t go and found a company like Milestone — dedicated to furthering a multicultural and multiracial approach to comics — without caring a lot about racial relations in America — and that both helped and hindered him. He got lots of positive press and was very well respected by people who cared about diversity in comics. But it made him a target for other people who liked to see comics as a “Whites Only” zone.

The last of his work that I got to read was his run on “Justice League” a few years back. It started off great and got derailed by editorial mandates from on high. I think DC didn’t treat him right — gave him the title just so they could get their hands on Static and a few other Milestone characters, then ran him off when they had what they wanted.

I never knew him personally, but I loved his work. He’s got my thanks forever, because he got me back reading comics again.

Raise your mugs high, people. To Dwayne McDuffie.